l used to walk past this building on High Holborn for years and always assumed it was mock Tudor. Turns out I was wrong and on more than one account. It isn’t one building, its two. If you look at the two right hand gables in the picture below, you can see they belong to one building whilst the five gables on the left are part of a second separate building. Oh, and the buildings are real Tudor, put up in the 16th century even if they have been refurbished several times after surviving the Great Fire of London and having a bomb dropped on their rear gardens by the Luftwaffe in the Second World War.
When I worked in the area, a friend of mine’s Dad used to own a lovely old tobacconist that sat under the eaves of the right hand building, just by the entrance to Chancery Lane tube. Even though I didn’t smoke I used to pop in to smell the cigars. They smelt lovely. The shop was called John Brumfit in those days (back in the1980’s) and later Shervingtons. Nowadays its been swept away by the tidal wave of expensive coffee that has poured through London and is a coffee shop. It was an appropriate place for a tobacconist. Richard Lloyd started his tobacco business on this street in 1785 and his famous “Old Holburn” mix used a picture of Staple Inn in its logo.
What I also hadn’t realised was that this black and white Tudor frontage is part of the last standing Inn of Chancery (which was traditionally where solicitors were trained and officed – barristers were trained and officed nearby at the Inns of Court). There used to be nine or ten such Inns (the number is didputed) and each was attached to the more senior Inns of Court”like Maids of Honour to a Princess” according to the write John Fortescue. Staple Inn came under the leadership of nearby Gray’s Inn until the nineteenth century when the Inns of Chancery were dissolved. Nowadays the building is used as office space including the home of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries – which reminds me of the old joke that actuaries are boring accountants. How the mighty old building is fallen. Actuaries and a coffee shop!
If you go down the side of the buildings you see a gate that takes you through to the Inn proper.
There is a small garden that leads into the entrance to the Inn and the hall that is on the right hand side of the picture below. This hall – and most of the rest of Staple Inn is not original Tudor and much was rebuilt in the eighteenth century. To the right of the hall is an entrance that takes you into a marvelous little cobbled square where trees and benches provide a lovely space to sit and ponder the world whilst eating a sandwich. The square has an odd little pump in one corner which was installed in 1937 to replace previous pumps that date back to the original building.
You can walk back out onto High Holborn through a gate which you can see to the right of the picture above and in more detail below.
And when you return to the busy street you can look back into the calm oasis of the hidden square within, glance up at the heavy beamed eaves bearing down towards the pavement and for a moment imagine your self in medieval London. Once upon a time much of London would have looked like this, with chambermaids emptying their pots on the unsuspecting pedestrians below and Shakespeare running by with his latest play tucked under his arm. (This is not too much of a flight of fancy – the hall of nearby Gray’s Inn was used by travelling players to put on the plays of Shakespeare including probably the debut of The Comedy Of Errors in 1594.) But now it is one of the few medieval buildings to remain. I wonder at just how many millions of Londoners have walked busily and obliviously past this building over the four hundred or so years of its existence and not wondered at its marvels.
If you enjoyed this post, you may enjoy the following:
Temple Tudor (and other earlier period buildings)
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